"He coerced her into listening to him and not following our directions, and the next thing I knew, my daughter wasn't communicating with me," Burns said last year.

He told the station that his daughter has Asperger syndrome and the family did everything they could to prevent this from happening. "We had tried to eliminate all social media from our home. Telephones, computers, and she still found ways around it. She would use friends' smartphones or the school library computer," Burns said.